Arrangements described herein relate to managing allocation of hardware resources in a virtualized environment.
Optimization of information technology (IT) resources is valuable to any organization using such resources, especially to organizations using data centers. A common approach to optimizing the use of IT resources is to reduce the total number of physical servers in a data center using server virtualization. With server virtualization, a plurality of operating systems can be simultaneously executed on a single physical server. These operating systems may be the same version, but this need not be the case. Indeed, completely different operating systems can be executed on the same physical server. In this regard, the virtualized operating systems can operate independently of one another, even though they are hosted on the same hardware. Implementing server virtualization reduces the total number of physical servers used in a data center, thus reducing the capital expenditures required to acquire the equipment, maintenance costs and energy consumption.